Financial Crisis Called Off

          Whew, what a relief! 
Everybody from Ben Bernanke and a Who’s Who of banking poobahs
schmoozing it up in the heady vapors of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to the dull
scribes at The New York Times, toiling
in their MC Escher hall of mirrors, to poor dim James Surowiecki over at The
New Yorker, to – wonder of wonders! – the
Green Shoots claque at the cable networks, to the assorted quants, grinds,
nerds, pimps, factotums, catamites, and cretins in every office from the Bureau
of Labor Statistics to the International Monetary Fund – every man-Jack and
woman-Jill around the levers of power and opinion weighed in last week with
glad tidings that the world’s capital finance system survived what turned out
to be a mere protracted bout of heartburn and has been reborn as the Miracle
Bull economy. Our worries over.  If
you believe their bullshit.  Which
I don’t.

            All
this goes to show is how completely the people in charge of things in the USA
have lost their minds.  They seem
to think this mass exercise in pretend
will resurrect the great march to the WalMarts, to the new car showrooms, and
the cul-de-sac model houses, reignite another round of furious sprawl-building,
salad-shooter importing, and no-doc liar-lending, not to mention the pawning
off of innovative, securitized
stinking-carp debt paper onto credulous pension funds in foreign lands where
due diligence has never been heard of, renew the leveraged buying-out of
zippy-looking businesses by smoothies who have no idea how to run them (and no
real intention of doing it, anyway), resuscitate the construction of additional strip malls,
new office park “capacity” and Big Box “power centers,” restart the trade in
granite countertops and home theaters, and pack the turnstiles of Walt Disney
world – all this while turning Afghanistan into a neighborhood that Beaver
Cleaver would be proud to call home.

            By
the way – and please pardon the rather sharp digression – but does anybody know
if they buried Michael Jackson yet? 
It’s only been a couple of months. And, if not, is that the stench now
wafting across the purple mountains’ majesty from sea-to-shining sea? Isn’t it
a little indecent to keep the poor fellow waiting?  Or is a really surprising comeback secretly planned, with
product tie-ins and all?

            America
loves the word “recovery” as only a catastrophically sick society can. “In
recovery” is the new universal mantra of loser individuals and loser
nations.  Everybody in the USA is
in recovery.  Even Michael Jackson
(he may have given up on somatic activity but, on the plus side, as the Rotarians love to say, he’s quit using drugs
for once and for all, and the magazines have stopped publishing photos of him
taken after 1990, when he turned himself into something out of the Hammer Films
catalog).

            To
sum it all up, the US economy is in recovery.  Paul Krugman says that we’ll soon realize that Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) is growing. 
He actually said that on the Sunday TV chat circuit. Not to put too fine
a point on it, but I would really like to know what you mean by that Paul, you
fatuous wanker.  Do you mean that
the Atlanta homebuilders are going to open up a new suburban frontier down in
Twiggs County so that commuters can enjoy driving Chrysler Crossfires a hundred
and sixty miles a day to new jobs as flash traders in the Peachtree Plaza?  Do you mean that the Home Equity Fairy
is going to wade into the sea of foreclosure and save twenty million mortgage
holders currently sojourning in the fathomless depths with the anglerfish?  Do you mean that all the bales of
deliquescing, toxic “assets” hidden in the vaults of Citibank, JP Morgan, Bank
of America, et al, (not to mention on the books of every pension fund in the
USA, and not a few elsewhere) will magically turn into Little Debbie Snack
Cakes on Labor Day weekend?  Do you
mean that American Express and Master Card are about to declare a Jubilee on
accounts in default everywhere?  Do
you mean that General Motors will produce a car that a.) anyone really wants to
buy and b.) that the company can sell at a profit?  Are you saying we get a do-over, going back to, say,
1981?  Did we win some cosmic
lottery that hasn’t been announced yet? 
What’s growing in this country besides unemployment, bankruptcy,
repossession, liquidation, gun ownership, and suicidal despair?  In short, are you out of your mind,
Paul Krugman?

            The
key to the current madness, of course, is this expectation, this wish, really,
that all the rackets, games, dodges, scams, and workarounds that American
banking, business, and government devised over the past thirty years – to cover
up the dismal fact that we produce so little of real value­ these days – will
just magically return to full throttle, like a machine that has spent a few
weeks in the repair shop. This is not going to happen, of course.  It is permanently and irredeemably
broken – this Rube Goldberg contraption of swindles all based on the idea that
it’s possible to get something for nothing. And more to the point, we’re really
doing nothing to reconstruct our economy along lines that are consistent with
the realities of energy, geopolitics, or resource scarcity.  So far, our notions about a “green”
economy amount to little more than blowing green smoke up our collective ass.  We think we’re going to build “green”
skyscrapers! We’re too dumb to see what a contradiction in terms this is. The
architects are completely uninterested in the one thing that really is “green”
– traditional urban design – and most particularly the walkable
neighborhood.  That’s just too
conventional, not special enough, lacking in star power, not enough of a statement, boring, tedious, so not cutting edge! We blather about high speed rail, but you can’t even get
from Cleveland to Cincinnati on a regular train – and what’s more amazing,
nobody is really interested in making this happen.  All we really care about is finding some miracle method to
keep all the cars running.

            What
we’ve been seeing is nothing more than a massive pump-and-dump operation in the
stock markets, most of it executed by programmed robot traders, with the
trading nut provided by taxpayers current and future.  These shenanigans add up to new risks and fragilities so
extreme that the next time a grain of sand catches in the exquisite machinery they
will sink the USA as a viable enterprise. 
We will end up discrediting not just capitalism, but also the idea of
capital per se, that is, of deployable acquired wealth.  As this occurs, of course, events
on-the-ground will give new meaning to the term “reality television.”